A long song with many parts, still in progress (the first part being the first post)....Click on the links (in colored print) to take other paths. Music, poems, and illustrations Copyright 2014 by Jim Robbins. Tarot cards by Pamela Coleman Smith (in the public domain).

Friday, January 30, 2015

TAPESTRIES

Chinese houses are sprouting on north-facing slopes and in shady washes, sharing their niche with fairy lanterns, Ithuriel's spears, larkspur, while twenty miles away, the skeletalsteel frame of a children's hospital sprouts on the bluffs,on land donated by the developer, rising above condemned vineyards and pasture, a "behemoth of bad planning" inducing the growth of a new city through the expansion of one clogged artery of traffic just north of the river. In fields near the hospital, weeds stillhide mice and rabbits, obscuring coyotes in the dim halls of orchards, releasing air into an ocean of smog. I had almost forgotten that you can stand in an ocean of breathand merge your breath with brilliant tribesstruggling into the sun, that you can sit by a creek,no more than the stillness of the grass, sensing

the timeless spirit at the root of form, forgettingyour face as the battered moon rises again abovethe evening hills. Golden eagles sliced through the air side by side, just above me, down through the wash,swooping between the trees and gliding out over the valley until I lost them in the clouds, and an hour later, as I scrambled up the slope, the eagles stepped out of the oaks above me and floated--almost large enough to carryme away--gliding higher until they were specksand then gone. Sure of our end, I wantedto sleep forever in the woods, the valleystretching out for miles in the haze, below methe landmarks strangely small, the strident whistle of the titmouse calling me back, a networkof trails linking the creeks and woodlands--

still pristine (except for the cattle), the trails webbing the entire range blocked by pockets of development, the land owners allconnected. I teetered on the edge of that high ridge, the city so obscured by smog I couldn't see it--perhaps gone a century--a web slightly billowing

in the breeze, and I chased a meadowlark at the edge of a large flock downhill, a squirrel scurrying over its own thin trail from one rock pile to another, ants slowly

discarding husks from their tunnels. Overhead, a flock of acorn woodpeckers set up an alarm, cacklingmaniacally as I passed through their territory, the trail weaving into a clearing where I found

a pounding stone, one mortar sprouting grass, the other black with stagnant water, the roots of a buckeye breaking the rock in two. I followed every path by the creek, finding more pounding stones wherever I turned, clearly in view of each other or parts of the village on both sides of the creek. I sensed a radiance that somehow remainsin the village sites, the mortars healed overand sprouting grass, others collecting rain, most of the house pits quilted by cow piessprouting living jewels, the hillsides nearbytorn and washed away, streaked with ochre, yellow, black, one pit-- with a fence post in the middle danglingfrom a strand of barbed wire--so deep

I could not see the bottom, another filledwith lime-green water, the slopesnear the mines scored by mule and horse paths.That day I lost myself on the trails,and when I stepped across a creek,I had a vision of the harmonyof things--a golden, equal-armed crossbehind manifestation blazingin my inner eye as though it were alwaysjust beneath the outer robe of concealment--the energy radiant in each leaf and petal--and Ihad taken just enough steps to see it.A massive oak kept reaching higherwithin an infinitely vast fabric of energy,the sun, through its branches,still weaving tapestries of flowers.